01 April 2008

Tunguska, the Horns of the Moon and Evolution

Last time I said I was going to talk about how much your "gloriousleaders" really hate and despise you and how they are plotting yourdeaths while most of you are so screwed up that you not only do not seethis, you actually dance blithely toward disaster for yourselves andyour children. Well, I'm going to get there, but first, I want to tieup a few loose ends and reiterate a couple of points.

As I mentioned in my previous article on this topic, the Discovery Channel special Super Comet - After the Impact,places the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs in a modern setting,using the same type of cometary body assumed to have caused theextinction of the dinosaurs, the same size, same impact location, andutilized all the computer modeling they have done on this past event totry to show what might happen (and to show what they think happenedthen).

Studies of the history of the Earth via various scientific methodsshow us that there are relatively long periods of "evolution"punctuated by rapid, overwhelming changes we call catastrophes. Manyscientists have noted the periodicity of these punctuational events.What no one seems to know for sure is the mechanism that induces thesedefinitely periodic catastrophes.

It is suggested that the periodicity of these events relates togalactic cycles and there is good evidence for this view presented byVictor Clube in his book The Cosmic Winter. (You can really forget the nonsense going around about "Planet Nibiru" and "Project Camelot").He suggests that galactic tides induct giant comets into our Solarsystem and it is their disintegration products which interact stronglyand directly with the Earth with variable results at different (andvery frequent!) periods which results in the variations in thegeological record. Clube demonstrates that the breaking up of a giantcomet produces a wide range of debris from objects 10 km across, tohundreds or thousands of 1 km sized bodies, to multiple swarms ofsub-kilometer sized bodies. Many of these bodies have sooty, blacksurfaces making them almost impossible to see and many of them are inan orbit very similar to the Taurid meteor streams, though a few may bein an orbit rotated about 90 degrees. Clube posits that many (if notmost or all) of the asteroids in the Solar system split from a giantcomet (or many of them) thousands or tens of thousands of years ago,and it is the streams of debris that pose the most serious andimmediate threats to our planet.

For example, one of the large asteroids in an Earth-crossing orbitis named Hephaistos. It is about 10 km in diameter, about the same sizeas the asteroid that is depicted as striking the earth in theabove-mentioned movie (the dinosaur extinction model). It is true thatthe effects of the impact of such a body would be felt globally, but itis not so clear that it would be exactly as "global" as depicted in themovie.

Nevertheless, the connection between a single impactor and past massextinctions has been made and popularized widely, and this may beunfortunate considering the issues of more frequent and less "global"events that Clube addresses.

The problem is, as Clube points out, a solitary large impact is,from an astronomical point of view, quite unlikely to be the onlyagency at work in such extinctions. Further, when one considers thedetails of the evidence, both astronomical and geological, manydiscrepancies in the single impactor scenario begin to emerge.

When the Alvarezes, pere et fils, came across the iridiumlayer at the K-T extinction boundary, announcing that iridium in thoseamounts could only be thrown up by the impact of a large meteorite,this shocking idea was taken up gleefully by the press and everyone wason the hunt for iridium.

Clube points out that there are several problems with the "singleimpact" interpretation of the presence of iridium at the extinctionboundary. The first problem is that the concentration of the element is too high.Why? Well, because if it were a single, giant impactor, such anasteroid would excavate several hundred times its own volume of Earthcrust material and blow it into the atmosphere mixed with its ownmaterial. This means that the iridium would be significantly dilutedand would not precipitate on the planet in such concentrations as havebeen found. However, at many of the sites examined, it is noted thatthe iridium has been diluted by only 20 times its own volume (keepingin mind that the iridium in the comet/asteroid is already only apercentage of the total volume of the extraterrestrial body!)

Additionally, other chemicals associated with the alleged singleimpact event do not fit the stony meteorite theory very well. There isan abundance of rare elements such as osmium and rhemium; enormous andoverabundant common elements such as antimony and arsenic. In respectof this finding, Clube points out that, after a January 1983 eruptionof Kilauea, particles collected from the volcano were found to havehigh concentrations of arsenic, selenium and other elements found inhigh abundance at the extinction boundary. These volcanic particleswere also found to be very rich in iridium. Clube suggests that theiridium anomaly may, therefore, be a big red herring. He notes: "...itis interesting to speculate whether, had a volcanic source of iridiumbeen known in 1980, a meteorite impact would have been suggested" bythe Alvarezes?

Probably not.

So, that was probably a good thing because it at least drew pressattention to the matter since Clube also points out that there is animpressive amount of evidence that the extinction event was not just aprocess of evolutionary change and decay. Catastrophic changes - aprofound ecological shock - took place across the Cretaceous-Tertiaryboundary, and the devastation was certainly sudden. So the Alvareztheory opened the door to consider that in a world that was tightlybound up in Uniformitarianism.

Among the interesting finds at this level of Earth's history is thatvery large amounts of soot are also present at the extinction boundary.The conclusion is, of course, that global wildfires were raging duringthe extinction event. The movie tried to depict that with computermodels (made on the assumption of a single large asteroid impact) whichhad the entire atmosphere of the earth heating up to the point wherethings just ignited spontaneously. That may not be exactly how thingshappen even with a very large meteor impact.

The thin clay layer that marks the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks. This layer has been found at many localities around the Earth. It is a a thin layer of material all around the earth which contains a large amount of the rare element iridium, plus soot from widespread fires.

Another point that Clube makes is that there is not a trace ofmeteoritic debris in the form of stony inclusions in the sediments.

I won't go into all the details; suffice it to say that it begins tolook like the stray impact of a single 10 km wide asteroid is not thecause of the global extinction after all.

What is a realistic scenario?

Clube presents the evidence that this extinction event was anepisode of bombardment of many, dozens, hundreds, thousands of cometaryfragment and/or meteorite type bodies, some of them large, liberatingcopious amounts of meteorite dust in the Terran atmosphere, many ofthem exploding overhead in rains of fire. These swarms would be"swimming" in streams of comet dust - tons of it - which would also beloading the atmosphere and precipitating onto the earth over months andyears. The high concentrations of iridium found at the dinosaurextinction boundary at several localities, and the absence of bulkmeteoritic debris, are hard to explain in terms of a single big bangbut easily understood in terms of zodiacal dust as a provider of theinput. Added to this, there is increasing evidence for a multiplicityof impacts at the dinosaur extinction boundary, as well as at otherpoints of global catastrophe such as the Permian - Triassic (P - Tr) extinction event.The swarm theory also easily accounts for the huge amounts of soot atthe boundary. An Earth ablaze is within the capacity of anexceptionally intense swarm to produce, but probably beyond that ofeven a 10km wide single impactor. In short, the extinction of thedinosaurs may very well have been a complex, traumatic, and prolongedaffair.

Clube proposes that the Earth itself is a storehouse of informationabout its interactions with the Galaxy, and that it is the Galaxyitself, and Earth's position in it, that drives the cycles ofextinctions mainly because the cycles of events best fit known galacticcycles.

The one thing that stands out from all of the evidence is theimportance of very large comets that enter the Solar System and breakapart, leaving streams of debris that interact with our planet formillennia after the parent body or bodies have been captured and tornapart by intra-solar system forces. That such bombardments of the earthhave occurred at other times is becoming more widely known, witness thework of Richard Firestone, Alan West and Simon Warwick-Smith who haveidentified the Carolina Bays as "air impact" craters from overheadcometary explosions exactly like that of Tunguska. In fact, similar"craters" were found in the Tunguska region with the exact samemorphology. This even has been dated to about 12,500 years ago and wasglobal in extent and cataclysmic in effect. Life on Earth almost cameto an end. What is frightening about this even is the sheer numbers ofcraters - upwards of 50,000 of them.

The largest crater in this particular image is approximately 1.4 miles across

Companion Star?

Clube mentions the companion star hypothesis briefly, noting that"Certainly the companion-star hypothesis adopts the central mechanismof the galactic one, namely the creation of comet showers throughregular comet cloud disturbances." He then dismisses this as facing"insuperable problems." The "insuperable problems" are the proposedorbital periods for the hypothesized companion star and his idea thatthere would be far more cratering if the motive mechanism was acompanion star. He may be entirely correct and his theory of galactictides and comet birth in the cold, dark reaches of space certainlydeals with the main elements of what we know about our celestialenvironment. As he notes:

The astronomical framework, grounded in celestial observations, isthe basis for the theory of terrestrial catastrophism described here.... It is in our view essential , if one is to arrive at a truepicture, to take account of all the relevant evidence: "hard evidence"in the geologist's sense has to be coupled with some respect for hardastronomical facts as well. Put another way, we do not need a 1 - kmasteroid to land in our presence to demonstrate the amount of kineticenergy it will release. In particular, the correct picture must explainrecent as well as past events in the terrestrial record. Thus the giantcomet, and indeed the historical record, are essential elements in thequest for overall truth. It is this inextricable linkage between thevery recent and the very remote past which lends urgency to the study:if we get the grand picture wrong, the next set of old bones in theground could be ours.

We have presented some good evidence in this series of articles thatClube's ideas are very likely correct or darn close: the earth has beenrepeatedly and regularly showered with extraterrestrial debris of somesort, and these showers have been generally disastrous from localscales, to regional, national, and even continental. It seems clearfrom the evidence that history itself is not a process of evolution,but more often, devolutionary as each cosmic crisis has either resultedin "survival of the lucky," as opposed to the fittest, and the morerecent ones have been amplified or utilized by ruling elites to pursuetheir own agendas. On other occasions, the Earth has suffered insultsthat have hardly turned a head in the human population. Tunguska wasone such event.

Tunguska

Just after 7:15 a.m. local time on 30 June 1908, in the centralSiberian plateau, there took place an impact of ferocious intensity.Yet so isolated and vast is this region (half as large again as theUSA), it was almost twenty years before the Western world became awareof the event.

On the night of 30 June and 1 July, the sky throughout Europe wasstrangely bright. Throughout the United Kingdom, over 3000 miles fromthe point of impact, it was possible to play cricket and readnewspapers by the glow from the night sky. From Belgium camedescriptions of a huge red glow over the horizon, after sunset, as if agreat fire was raging. This strangely bright sky was seen throughoutEurope, European Russia, Western Siberia and as far south as theCaucasus mountains. Photographs were taken at midnight or later, withexposures of about a minute, in Sweden, in Scotland, and as far east asthe university city of Kazan, on the banks of the river Volga....

Much comment was excited in newspapers and learned journals at thetime. Some thought that icy particles had somehow formed high in theatmosphere and were reflecting sunlight. Others considered that astrange auroral disturbance was involved. The Danish astronomer Kohldrew attention to the fact that several very large meteors had recently been observedover Denmark and thought that comet dust in the high atmosphere mightaccount for the phenomenon. But there was no agreement as to what hadhappened.

Over 500 miles to the south of the fall, a seismograph in the cityof Irkutsk near Lake Baikal, close to the Mongolian border, registeredstrong earth tremors.

Nearly 400 miles south-west of the explosion, at 7:17 a.m. on 30June, a train driver on the Trans-Siberian express had to halt thetrain for fear of derailment due to the tremors and commotion.

Fierce gusts of wind were felt in towns 300 to 400 miles away.

In an Irkutsk newspaper dated 2 July it was reported that, in avillage more than 200 miles from the Tunguska river, peasants had seena fireball brighter than the sun approach the ground, followed by ahuge cloud of black smoke, a forked tongue of flame and a loud crash asif from gunfire.

"All the villagers ran into the street in panic. The old women wept and everyone thought the end of the world was approaching."

[...]

Local Siberian newspapers carried stories of a fireball in the sky,and a fearful explosion, but by the autumn of 1908 these stories haddied out, and they went unnoticed in St. Petersburg, Moscow and thewest. The region was arguably one of the most inaccessible places onEarth, in the centre of Siberia. ... However, rumours of anextraordinary event persisted, transmitted back by geologists and otherintrepid researchers working in the area. These attracted the attentionof a meteorite researcher, Leonard Kulik,... It was not until 1927 thatan expedition ... led by Kulik, finally penetrated to the site of the1908 explosion.

[...]

The energy of the explosion has been calculated from the extent ofthe flattened forest and from the small pressure waves which arrived atthe speed of sound and were recorded on barographs around the world.... The wave trains were unlike any others which had been recorded upuntil that time but resemble those obtained from a hydrogen bombexplosion. It seems that the impact had an energy of 30 to 40 megatons,about that from a few dozen ordinary hydrogen bombs....

The date of fall (30 June) corresponds to the passage of the Earth through the maximum of the Beta Taurid stream. From this and its trajectory, it appears that the Tunguska object was part of the Taurid complex. Probably the Earth passed through a swarm within the stream.

This diagram shows the area of damage in Tunguska as compared to the size of Washington D.C.

The occurrence, this century, of an impact with the energy of ahydrogen bomb does give cause for some concern, and it is interestingto speculate on whether one's historical perceptions would be quite thesame had the bolide struck an urban area or a city. As it happens,however, the Tunguska impact is fairly trivial:

In this year, on the Sunday before the Feast of St. John theBaptist, after sunset when the moon had first become visible amarvelous phenomenon was witnessed by some five or more men who weresitting there facing the moon. Now there was a bright new moon, and asusual in that phase its horns were tileted toward the east; andsuddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the divisina flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance,fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which wasbelow writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and, to put it in the words ofthose who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moonthrobbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state.This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assumingvarious twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Thenafter these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is alongits whole lengthe, took on a blackish appearance. The present writerwas given this report by men who saw it with their own eyes, and areprepared to stake ther honour on an oath that they have made noaddition or falsification in the above narrative.

This curious report is written in the chronicles of the medieval monk known as Gervase of Canterbury. The year of the event was AD 1178 and the date, 18 June on the Julian calendar, converts to the evening of 25 Juneon the modern Gregorian one. If real, it is clear that someextraordinary event on the Moon is being described and the meteoriteexpert Hartung proposed that what was observed and recorded 800 yearsago was the impact of a body on the Moon. The flame, he suggested, wasthe writhing of incandescent gases, or sunlight reflection from dustthrown out of the crater. The blackish appearance of the Moon along itswhole length was a temporary suspension of dust buoyed up by atransient atmosphere. [...]

Hartung deduced that if there was a crater, it would be at least 7miles in diameter, possess bright rays extending from it for at leastseventy miles, and would lie between 30 and 60 degrees north, 75 and105 degrees east on the Moon. ...

As it happens, there is one crater with the predicted characteristics exists, a crater named after the seventeenth-century heretic Giordano Bruno.This crater is located at 36 degrees N and 105 degrees E, within thepredicted area. It is 13 miles in diameter and is distinguished by itsremarkable brightness, and by the brilliant system of rays which extendseveral hundred miles out from it. [...]

It should be noted that NASA has attempted to debunk Hartung's theory, saying:

Such an impact would have triggered a blizzard-like, week-longmeteor storm on Earth -- yet there are no accounts of such a storm inany known historical record, including the European, Chinese, Arabic,Japanese and Korean astronomical archives.

Well, we know from our current survey that this is not necessarilyso. There could have been impacts on the earth that no one knew about -witness Tunguska - and it doesn't necessarily follow that an impactoron the moon would trigger a blizzard of meteors on Earth.

Back to Clube:

It is the fate of all species to become extinct andmost manlike species have already done so. Over and above extinction,large population fluctuations take place in nature, sometimes within afew years. The controlling factor is often climate, and Earth'sclimate, in turn, can be greatly affected by its astronomicalsurroundings.

It has been suggested that the current "climate change" issues aredue to the earth moving through cosmic dust clouds. It could even bethat such things as "chemtrails" are a result of such dust loading inthe upper atmosphere.

The two and a half centuries which lay between theGervase chronicle of 1178 and the onset of the Black Death in Europe in1348 saw 'an acute crisis developing in human affairs'. One chroniclerat least reports of the most immediate cause of the plague in 1345 that"between Cathay and Persia there rained a vast rain of fire; falling inflakes like snow and burning up mountains and plains and other lands,with men and women; and then arose vast masses of smoke; and whosoeverbeheld this died within the space of half a day..." There seems littledoubt also that a worldwide cooling of the Earth played a fundamentalpart in the process. The Arctic polar cap extended, changing thecyclonic pattern and leading to a series of disastrous harvests. Thesein turn led to widespread famine, death and social disruption.

In England and Scotland there is a pattern of abandoned villages and farms, soaring wheat prices and falling populations.

In Eastern Europe there was a series of winters of unparalleledseverity and depth of snow. The chronicles of monasteries in Poland andRussia tell of cannibalism, common graves overfilled with corpses, andmigrations to the west.

Even before the Black Death came, then, a human catastrophe of greatproportions was under way in late medieval times. Indeed the cold snaplasted well beyond the period of the ... plague. A number of suchfluctuations are to be found in the historical record, and there isgood evidence that these climatic stresses are connected not only withfamine but also with times of great social unrest, wars, revolution andmass migrations.

In spite of their traumatic effects, these global coolings probablyamounted to no more than about a degree in average summer temperaturesas compared with today: even relatively minor climatic effects have hada profound influence on human history. A major climatic coolingamounting to several degrees. With the modern dependence on 'greenrevolution' crops, finely tuned to give a high yield under a narrowrange of climatic conditions, the onset of such a 'winter' would causethe population of the world to crash in the course of a decade, or evena single year. Such events are completely outside normal experience andtheir existence is not generally recognized, even though they representa hazard vastly more horrific than any of the more familiarcatastrophes such as earthquake, famine or flood. ... More to the pointthough, civilization is in the presence of a hitherto unrecognizedcosmic phenomenon which could plunge it without warning into a Dark Age.

What can be done?

Unfortunately the extent and epoch of the next cosmic winter dependfor the moment on a number of imponderables which lie outside the scopeof existing knowledge: it is not now possible to make an accurateassessment of what the future has in store. This is clearly not asatisfactory state of affairs. Nor can we expect that Nature will hold back on account of our ignorance or lack of preparedness.However, in view of the seriousness of cosmic winters for humansurvival, and noting the vast expenditures to the tune of many billionsof dollars on a whole variety of preparations for all manner of lesserhazards and calamities, both man-made and natural, disease and nuclearwar not excluded, one must surely note also that not a single cent of taxpayer' money is currently devoted to their study. [...]

The first step must therefore be one of exploration. An asteroid ina Taurid orbit, carrying 100,000 megatons of impact energy, coming outof the night sky, would be visible in binoculars for about six hoursbefore impact. By the time it was a naked-eye object it would be atmost half an hour from collision. In its final plunge it would be seenas a brilliant moving object for perhaps 30 seconds. One needs moretime than this to prepare for the [Cosmic] Winter. A thoroughexploration of the Earth's surroundings, and the discovery and trackingof probably tens of thousands of bodies, is therefore a firstrequirement. This is technically feasible.

Complementing such an observational programme, a fresh explorationof the past, armed now with the new astronomical understandings, isalso necessary; not just for its own sake but also to arrive at abetter understanding of the risks. .[...]

To go from mere statistical projection to detailed forecasting,then, a generation of exploration, both of the Earth's environment andof our history and prehistory, will be necessary. As we have remarked,such studies cannot be seen only as an academic game: there is nothing academic about a 1,000 megaton impact, and the modern prospects for nuclear error, not to mention nuclear meltdown, exacerbate the issue.

And if the sirens should sound, what then? It may be marginallywithin the capacity of present day technology to divert a smallasteroid, given enough warning, though not a swarm of them... But atleast, unlike our forebears, we have a chance to act: we need no longerbe helpless in the hands of the gods. The main problem at the moment is to be aware that there is a problem.

Three thousand years ago, in accordance with age-old practice, thekings of Babylon were still employing astronomer-priests to givewarnings of cosmic visitations. A thousand years ago, the emperors ofChina were still relying on similar skills, while in Europe the Popesaw messages in the sky and urged Holy War. But this latter was anaberration; for the last two and a half thousand years have seen thedecline and fall of the sky gods, and the growing presumption that thecosmos is stable and regular. The shift of paradigm has beenunconscious, convenient, insidious and thorough. Probably, therediscovery of a lost tradition of celestial catastrophe could not havebeen made through analysis of ancient texts alone; a key had to beprovided, and it has been, by the paraphernalia of modern science. Itis a salutary lesson both on the capacity of human reasoning to get itwrong for long periods of time, and on the essential unity of knowledge.

It would be naïve to think, however, that one merely has to point todeep-seated cracks in the structure of modern knowledge to havescholars setting to and constructing a better framework within whichmankind might plan his future. There is considerableintellectual capital invested in the status quo, enough to ensure thatthose with an interest in preserving it, the 'enlightened' and the'established', will continue to present the cosmos to us in a suitablynon-violent form. The history of ideas reveals that some will even go further and act as a kind of thought police,whipping potential deviants into line. For them, temporal power takesprecedence over the fate of the species. (Clube, The Cosmic Winter)

Famed astronomer, Fred Hoyle, friend and colleague of Clube, madesome interesting remarks in his book: "The Origin of the Universe andthe Origin of Religion" along the same lines.

Science is unique to human activities in that it possesses vastareas of certain knowledge. The collective opinion of scientists inthese areas about any problem covered by them will almost always becorrect. It is unlikely that much in these areas will be changed in thefuture, even in a thousand years. And because technology rests almostexclusively on these areas the products of technology work as they areintended to do.

But for areas of uncertain knowledge the story is very different.Indeed the story is pretty well the exact opposite, with the collectiveopinion of scientists almost always incorrect.

There is an easy proof of this statement. Because of the largenumber of scientists nowadays and because of the large financialsupport which they enjoy, uncertain problems would mostly have beencleared up already if it were otherwise. So you can be pretty certainthat wherever problems resist solution for an appreciable time by anappreciable number of scientists the ideas used for attacking them mustbe wrong.

It is therefore a mistake to have anything to do with popular ideas for solving uncertain issues, and the more respectable the ideas may be the more certain it is that they are wrong. [...]

Another big one for the book is the origin of life, which accordingto respectable opinion happened here on the Earth. Imagine the Earth'shistory to be represented by a single day. Then the origin of life didnot occur in the last 20 hours because there is fossil evidence thatlife has existed over the last 20 hours. Nor did life originate in thefirst 3 1/2 hours, because in this early period the Earth was soheavily bombarded by missiles from outside that even rocks werepulverized so violently as to be unable to preserve their integrity. Solife, if it originated on the Earth, did so between 03:30 a.m. and04:00 a.m. We therefore ask for the evidence that the amazingbiochemical miracle of the origin of life happened in thiscomparatively brief window in the Earth's history. A few sedimentaryrocks have survived from it, but they have unfortunately been heated somuch that any fossil evidence of life and its origin which might haveexisted have been lost. Thus the evidence for the respectable popularbelief is nil.

This is one remarkable aspect of the popular belief, that it is founded on nothing.

The other remarkable aspect is the intensity of the opprobrium oneincurs if one denies it. Only a little biochemical knowledge is neededto see this is yet another situation to set the cats in an uproar.

Biology is replete with them. We are told that natural selectionacts to spread small advantageous mutations and operates to suppressdisadvantageous bones. But small changes must be frequent if a speciesis to go anywhere much, in which case the bad and the good aresuperposed on each other, and how then does natural selection manage toseparate them? With the bad generally accepted to be more frequent thanthe good, all natural selection can do, in simple replicative systemsat any rate, is to minimise the rate at which things get worse.

You would think this problem would have been addressed with some care, but as far as I can see it never is. The fossil record of the last 500 millions years provides a serious indictment of biological thinking on evolution.It provides ample evidence of small changes and little or none of bigchanges. So if evolution is correct, as I suspect it to be, the bigchanges occur swiftly and the small changes slowly, the big changes soswiftly that they cannot be captured by the random moments revealed bythe fossil record. As a physicist might put it, evolution takes placethrough a sequence of delta-functions, not smoothly as according torespectable scientific academies it is supposed to do.

More than a century ago Alfred Russell Wallace noticed that the higher qualities of Man are acausal, like the Universe itself. Wherehuman qualities have been honed by evolution and natural selectionthere is very little difference between one individual and another. Givenequivalent opportunities for training, healthy human males of age 20will hardly differ in their abilities to run at pace by more than 10percent between the Olympic runner and the average.

But for the higher qualities it is very much otherwise.From enquiries among teachers of art, Wallace estimated that for everychild who draws instinctively and correctly there are a hundred thatdon't. The proportions are much the same in music and mathematics. Andfor those who are outstanding in these fields the proportions are morelike one in a million. Having made this point Wallace then made thestriking argument that, while the abilities with small spread likerunning would have been important to the survival of primitive man, thehigher qualities had no survival value at all.

Perhaps this is not entirely true? Perhaps "higher abilities" hadsurvival value in terms of those individuals who could "read thehandwriting on the wall" in a scientifically observational way? Or,more speculatively, perhaps higher abilities could ensure survival bywarning an individual that catastrophe was on its way thereby enablingthem to act in preparation to survive?

Over a span of 12 years spent in the Amazon and inthe forests of the East Indies, Wallace is said to have discovered30,000 new species off his own bat. He lived by shipping his specimensto an agent in London who then marketed them to museums. During most ofthe time, when he wasn't writing epoch-making papers on biologicalevolution, he lived with primitive tribesmen. Wallace therefore knew agreat deal about the modes of survival of primitive man, probably morethan anybody else of his generation and probably more than anybody doestoday. His views on the matter therefore carry weight. What he said wasthat in his experience he never saw a situation in which an aptitude for mathematics would have been of help to primitive tribes. So little numerate were they that in 12 years he saw only a few who could count as far as 10.

His conclusion was the higher qualities, thequalities with large variability from individual to individual, had notbeen derived from natural selection.

Abilities derived from natural selection have small spread. Abilities not derived from natural selection have wide spreads.

[...]

I think the higher qualities must be of genetic origin, thesame as the rest. The mystery is that we have to be endowed with therelevant genes in advance of them being useful. The time orderof events is inverted from what we would normally expect it to be, aconcept that is of course gall and wormwood to respectable opinion. Theobjection is that it explodes one's concepts, raising all manner of newideas. Which is exactly what respectability dislikes, because it isonly in times of stagnation that respectability flourishes.[...]

Already in 1813, in a lecture to the Royal Society of London,William Wells described the process of evolution by natural selection.In the early 1830's it was being asked how this process might go indetail. Could it explain evolution on a large scale, as in thewell-known picture of evolution occurring like a branching tree?General opinion was that it could not, and for a reason that was goodand which was never answered in the enthusiasms of the later Darwinianmovement.

It was observed that plants and animals always, or almost always,have limited habitats, usually with quite sharp boundaries in whichthey thrive and outside which they do not.

Why, if evolution could produce very large differences likethose between horses, bears and primates, could it not produce the muchsmaller differences that would serve to enable species to extend theirlimited habitants?

Why did each species not have the plasticity (as it was called) tospread itself all over the world? The fact that this emphatically wasnot what happened suggested that, while by selection eachspecies fine-tuned its abilities within the range accessible to it, therange in every case is small, far smaller than would be needed toproduce the difference between horses and bears. (Hoyle, The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion)

Hoyle's remarks quoted above certainly raise a lot of questions, butthe one that immediately comes to my mind is: are human beings with"higher faculties" mutations? A related question might also be: arepsychopaths also mutations in the other direction? But I don't want todivert onto that topic just yet, we'll save it for another article.Again, I want to reiterate what I wrote in the previous article:

If short-period bombardment of our planet by comets or comet dust isa reality (as it increasingly appears to be); and the effects of suchan event are deleterious in the extreme; and if we are in fact overduefor a repeat performance of such a visitation (which also appears to bethe case); what effect might public awareness of this have on thestatus quo on the planet at present? Would the bogus "war on terror"not become instantly obsolete and would people across the planet notimmediately demand that their political leaders reassess priorities andtake whatever action possible to mitigate the threat? And if thosepolitical leaders refused to do so and it became known that that thisgrave threat to the lives of billions was long-standing and commonknowledge among the political elite (with all that that implies), whatthen? Revolution? One last hurrah before the 6th extinction?

Who knows. We only know that this knowledge, in its fullestexplication, is being suppressed and marginalized. The reasons for thepsychological games and ploys may be interesting to investigate. sothat is what we will look at next: Why is Humanity so Deaf, Dumb andBlind?

what are you talking about the nonsense of Nibiru and Project Camelot? 1. What do u have against the web site Project Camelot? Are u uncomfortable with views and information that your belief system does not deem as valid? 2. Nonsense about Nibiru?? ibiru is the 4th dimensional flagship of the Milky Way Galaxy’s Galactic Federation. Like Pelegai, many different civilizations have representatives that live aboard it. As well as being a Federation Flagship, Nibiru is also a planet and a battle star. Nibiru is a little over three times the size of earth.

Nibiru was originally a planet that was thrown out of orbit with the implosion/explosion of Sirius B. It wound up in the Pleiades and therefore is known to some as a Pleiadian planet.

Nibiru became a star ship when it was converted from a near lifeless form, hollowed out and turned into a ship. You could liken it in some ways to the space station on the TV show called Deep Space Nine. The only difference is that Nibiru travels the galaxy. That is why the people live inside of it instead of on the surface. Another reason is that it was created for deep space travel where there would be no sun for many years. In a way, you could say that it is an artificial planet. Only the shell is original.Nibiru remains our trigger for awakening. Once it gets close enough to us, uncloaks and shows itself, it will bring about a universal shift in consciousness. Mankind will then wake up to the fact that they are not alone in the universe and will begin to search for the reason and purpose behind this great planet/ship. It is then that the ancient knowledge suppressed by the religions and governments of earth in order to control the people, will come to light. Mankind’s true identity will be made known to them and they will have the opportunity to embrace it on a global scale.

Nibiru’s effects are already being felt. Due to its massive size, Nibiru is already affecting our weather, our planetary frequency and our sun. Once again, I am not a scientist so I cannot give you this information in those terms. I will give you what they show me.

Nibiru is affecting our sun. Because of the pressure being exerted by its mass moving closer to us, it is creating pressure on the sun. This pressure is like squeezing a tomato until it begins to rupture. These ruptures are the solar flares and emissions from the sun. The sun is changing and emitting more light. Much like going from a 75 watt bulb to a 150 watt bulb. This changes our DNA and activates the dormant codes within it to begin the transmutation of our bodies from carbon-based to crystalline-based.